Users of social networks typically enjoy sharing information about themselves with friends and others, and with seeing information about their friends. For example, many users provide short posts that describe recent happenings in their lives, link to content that they recently located and found to be interesting, or post digital photos of things they have done recently.
Social network systems also provide services that track what users do and that require less active involvement of the users. For example, a user may allow his or her location to be tracked (e.g., with GPS functionality provided in their smartphone) and reported to friends. A user may also “check-in” at particular venues such as restaurants, bars, and museums, and the occurrence of the visit may be reported to the user's friends or to others. The user may then make comments about the venue, and other users can later see those comments (e.g., as restaurant reviews and the like).
Users may also accumulate status points for visiting certain venues, and their status may be represented by an icon that can be displayed with their user profile in a system. For example, if a user visits museums frequently, a system can give the user an award that is represented by a badge on their home page or profile that indicates that the user is thoughtful and sophisticated (e.g., a badge that has a representation of Galileo in it). Such a badge can be seen by other users, who may then make judgments about the first user based on the types of badges the user has—much like people may make judgments about a member of the military based on the ribbons they see on the person's dress uniform.